Mental Mastery Mondays | Life Purpose, Productivity, And Self-discipline

To many people in the personal development world present a false reality to their audience. They present a view that their life is pretty, clean and packaged perfectly. That's not the way your life is and it's certainly not what my life looks like.  Your life is real. Your life isn’t made up of theories, it’s made up of real situations that aren’t always pretty and packaged up in a neat little bow.  Too much personal development advice is presented in this way.  My life is like yours. Real and very messy sometimes. But your success in life isn’t determined by what others do to you, but how you react to that.   When others bring a mess into your life, you can let that stop you and keep you from where you want to go, or you can bear down and push through and make progress.  When the Storms Raise at Sea One of my dreams is to take up sailing and spend an indefinite amount of time sailing around the world with no schedule and no agenda.  I’ve learned a bit about sailing, including sailing in the midst of a storm.

We’ve discussed the importance of staying in the moment and focusing on what needs to be done right now rather than consternating checking your progress or comparing yourself to others.  It’s true, it’s important. but…  As with so many other apparently “non-productive” things like play-time, we make them a vital part of our progress when we’re intentional about them.  Down time or play time can be a hurdle for us if we’re not in control of when it happens.  But when we do control it, it’s incredibly beneficial, actually helping us get more done during our non-downtime. Look Up From The Road in Front of You You may know some people who drive with their eyes only looking about 10 to 20 feed in front of them.  That’s not the safest way to drive, but sometimes in life, that’s the best way to get a lot of work done. Just focus on what’s NEXT To continue the metaphor, this is fine when you know had a break, gotten some rest and your tank is full. You have no reason to stop for several miles.  But, you can’t do this

I wish every person I love would listen to what's on this episode.  I'm honestly incredibly proud of what is put out on here.  In fact, I believe this is one of those moments when I just let the Infinite wisdom of the Universe speak through me. We only get stronger physically when we engage in physical resistance, like weight training.  We purposely cause ourselves to confront and deal with that sort of resistance. But, why don't we do the same thing emotionally? In fact, emotionally, we oftentimes work tirelessly to avoid the resistance that comes naturally.  We hope that we can some day have enough financially to help us avoid the resistance that comes emotionally. Listen to this episode and share it with everyone you know so they can realize that the pain we're struggling through right now is going to make us strong so the burdens which will come in the future will be much lighter. The past way for me to make your life better is to help you struggle through the burdens of today.

You know that feeling… when you put on your favorite jeans and … uh oh, they’re a little snug.  Or you look down at your shirt and you notice the buttons are straining a little more than you’d like, to keep things closed up. That’s what happened to me.  Why Physical Success Has Been a Struggle For Me Two things that work against me…  I LOVE food.  Seriously…  The other thing, I don’t don't LOVE exercise.  I love competitive sports, but just getting out and going for run around the neighborhood, or picking up some weights and doing some curls…  It’s boring to me. This Is Why I'm Using the MyFitnessPal App and Website Here's how this fantastic app works: You start off simple. How many calories go in versus many calories are consumed How much do you weigh? How much do you want to lose (or gain) per week (up to 2 lbs a week)  Then it knows how many calories you need to reach that goal How active are you? It then adjust your calorie goal based on that projected activity level and then  adjust it based on your real

As I mention in the intro, this show focuses on something I like to call “success for failures.”  The only thing is… most of us who have been made to feel like failures have so because we haven’t been able to do well on the "Grit Test." The Grit Test The Grit Test was developed by Harvard Research Angela Duckworth. She went over decades of data on what brought people to greatness in life and she came up with two major factors: People who didn’t change course just because they wanted a change. Something new. People who didn’t change course just because the current one become difficult. Maybe that’s you. As you can see, at the core of what she looked at was the ability to stick to the course you’re one. Basically … GRIT. Making it to the finish line…  G-R-I-T Predicts Success More Than S-A-T Angela Duckworth took her study of grit to Penn State She tested incoming students and found the ones with a high grit score but a low entrance exam, ended up having a higher GPA than those with a lower Grit score but highe

Today, the 22nd, as I record this, is my birthday. Along with birthdays comes…  birthday … cake. Wow, I can NOT focus after that piece of birthday cake.  I’m telling you, I’m distracted and unable to finish what I’ve started. It’s a struggle to do the outline for this show.  Let’s talk about why this happens and what we can do to not only avoid it, but reverse the scenario, and it doesn't just come from cake.  Glucose is Our Fuel Glucose is what most of our food turns into and it’s what we need for energy.  Without it, we crash and burn. We have zero energy. Research indicates the optimum level of glucose in our blood stream is 25 grams.  That’s about what you’ll get from one banana but keep in mind, that glucose is consumed over time. So you have to work at keeping your levels balanced. Too high and you suffer, too low and you suffer. You can do that by regulating your intake through grazing or by eating foods that are low on the Glycemic Index, which means they release glucose more slowly…  Amino Acids Tyro

Follow me for a minute…  Every once in a while, you may look at someone else and think “wow, they are messed up.”  Every once in a while, someone may look at you and think “Wow, they are messed up." Every once in a while, someone may look at that person and think “Wow, they are messed up. Possible?  Agree? Every single person can have someone else look at them and think “Wow, they are messed up." Do you think, if you followed this along for 10, 20, 100 or 1000 levels or more, you’d eventually get to someone who just has it all figured out and they’re doing fantastic? Following this path, do you think this is a progression UPWARD in character? Is this is character pyramid and there’s one person at the very top who has it all figured out and is beyond the judgement of others? No.  you’re right.  The person we reach after following this path for 1,000 occurrences probably has 10 people who could look at certain areas of their life and think “Wow, they are messed up." In fact, here’s what we’d find out.   Some

If you listened to this past Tuesday’s episode, I shared with you some ways you can help yourself become more productive, as I do every Tuesday.   One of those ways I suggested was to create deadlines with very real consequences.  The kind of consequences you’re going to do whatever you can to avoid.  Today I’m sharing with you and app that will help you do exactly that.   Stickk -  This is an app that comes out of Yale University.  It’s legit.  It’s got a lot of science behind it and it works!   Professor Dean Karlan teaches Economics and Professor Ian Ayers teaches law, both at Yale University.  They partnered with one of their students, Jordan Goldberg, to create a tool they knew would help people achieve their goals, and it works. Here’s why…  Stickk gives you a platform where you can create what the founders call Commitment Contracts. This is a contract you create with YOURSELF, but… there’s more to it than that.  We’ve all tried that and seen it fail time and time again.  A Commitment Contract involves

Events don’t have meaning - We give the events meaning The meaning of events exists only in our mind.  Outside of our mind, the events have no meaning at all.  Our emotional response to events comes from the meaning we give them and the way we FEEL about that meaning.  So, given the fact that our emotions are based on our reaction to the meaning of an event and we create the meaning of the event, then we control our emotions.  Peace doesn’t come when we have peace around us, but when we have peace within us.  See, we give events meaning in our minds. Our emotional response to events is based on the meaning they have. So when we have peace within, it doesn’t matter what happens outside of us, we will have peace.  Peace is independent of what is happening around us. Let’s look at how one may react to a particular situation given our internal state. Saturday morning, you open up your weather app and you see that it’s supposed to be 95 degrees with nothing but sunshine.  How do you react to that? If you were plan

Truth is, you’re incredibly unlikely to reach any goal you set if you don’t have the habits needed to make it happen. If it’s going to be grueling work the entire time, you’re increasing your chances for failure several times over. Last Wednesday we talked about how we can lose our willpower and self-discipline when it’s needed in numerous areas at the same time. Discover Where You’ll Need Will Power Let’s say you set a goal of “fitting into your old prom dress before your class reunion in 9 months." If that’s your goal, you’re immediately going to start doing some things that probably aren’t habits for you at this point.  Thinks like: Eating less calories each day Increasing the amount of water you drink Decreasing the number of carbs in your diet Running or biking several times a week Incorporating some resistance training and Getting enough sleep. If you try to do ALL of those things at the exact same time, you’re probably going to fail.  Your willpower and self-discipline is going to be so incredibly fa

If you're anything like me, you do your best work when you're facing a very real deadline with serious consequences or when you're part of group who you need to keep up with cause the entire group to fall behind. In this episode, we look at ways we can capitalize on this for increasing our daily productivity.  Give these a try in your day and let me know what worked best for you. Surround Yourself With More Productive People Hire an employee who runs faster than you. Someone you have to work at to keep up with. Someone who is nipping at your heels and ready to do your job.  This will make you feel like you’re falling behind every step of the way.  Talk about last minute… talk about forcing you to do more.  Join a Group Who Are Doing More Than You. I experienced this lesson myself this past year, with this podcast.  I went with a friend of mine, Jeff Brown, the host of the Read to Lead Podcast, which I highly recommend you listen to regularly, to New Media Expo in Las Vegas.  Jeff, my friend, was a superstar a

Drug Addicts Didn’t Wake up and Think I”m going to get hooked on coke today. It comes in tiny little incremental baby steps.  One line with a friend because it’s going to be a great night out and you haven’t had that in a while. That leads to two…  Then to buying a bit of your own so you can share next time (nobody likes mooch). Then just a bit the next morning to help you get started on your day.  … and so the story goes. These small little baby steps over time will lead to a major change in your life. There's something similar in the aviation world I’m a licensed pilot and one of the things we learn as pilots is just about every accident begins with one or more minor shifts outside of the safety area. One extra bag of souvenirs from the trip that put you near the weight limit. Knowing you still have plenty of fuel from the day before so you don’t need to do a visual check. Pushing on to the next airport because there’s a storm coming and you want to beat it. See, we push ourselves just a tiny bit outside of

It’s Friday and we’re going to look at a few tools you can use to keep track of your time each day.   If you go back and listen to Episode 131 this past Tuesday, we talked about how we can find lost time in our day.    That’s what these apps are used for.  They’re kind of like the diet or fitness apps that keep track of the food you eat each day.     Most of us don’t realize how many grams of protein, fat or carbohydrates we eat each day. But when we track them we can see if things are out of balance.   Same thing with your time.     If you don’t measure it, you won’t know if you’ve improved on it.  Measure. If you’ve ever used Mint on your computer or smartphone, you’ll understand this process.   You have to know where your money is going before you can really lay out an accurate budget. You have to know where you time is going before you can really lay out an accurate schedule.  So, let’s look at two apps that I think will help you track your time, without being a time drain themselves. That’s something you

I’m a generally a positive person and I tend to look on the positive side of things in life.  It’s odd though, most people who don’t know me think that means my life is without any down times or painful moments.  Nothing could be further from the truth, at least for me.  If you’ve ever thought, “Yeah, I’d be  positive too if I was living their life, but I’m not.  My life is a mess and I’m the one who messed it up!” Well, good news, ME TOO!  But I’m still positive. So, as someone who is considered a generally positive person, I want to share with you some truths about us positive happy people that you might not know.   5 Things you didn’t know about positive people.  1. We’re Flawed Yep, I’ve got a lot to work on in my life still.  This is something I openly share on this show all the time.  In fact, I’m working to set myself apart from most people who are teaching in the Personal Development space. I want to be very open about the fact that I don’t have it all perfected. Yes, I’ve studied all of this stuff a

Our brains can only handle a certain number of decisions before they just slow down.  There’s a fascinating study put out about prisoners facing parole boards.  Here's an article about in the New York Times. They looked at 1,100 decisions over the course of one year.  Prisoners facing the parole board in the morning were paroled about 70 percent of the time. Prisoners facing the parole board in the afternoons were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.  The study indicated, the judges ability to make sound decisions wore down as time went by in the day. A closer look at this study shows decisions in favor of parole would spike up right after a lunch or afternoon break.  A lot of decisions - or big difficult ones. Last Wednesday in episode 127 we talked about how we could increase our self-discipline if we focused on having it in one area alone.  So instead of trying to cut smoking, learn a new skill, eat healthier and start exercising, just focus on doing one of them at a time until it becomes a mindless h

Have you ever seen one of those time-lapse video’s in a bus station or maybe in a big city intersection? Everybody is flying all over the place in this jumbled mess of massive activity.  They all have somewhere to go or something to do, but when you look at it from that level, it looks like something that borders on chaos.  This is how our day can look when we glance back at it and wonder were all our time went and why we didn’t get all of our stuff done. We see a mass busy-ness with what seems like a lot of productive activity.  But…  When you slow it down, zoom in and see what actually happened, you notice, there’s one person in the train station who walked up to the newsstand and stayed there for about 30 minutes, just flipping through magazines.  You notice another person who ran into a friend and 40 minutes later, said farewell and continued on. This is what happens in our day.  From a distance, it’s a mass of activity, but when we really look closer, we see the Devil in the details.  Start An Activity (

I love auto racing. I used to dream of doing some cross-country rally racing back when I was in my early 20’s.  I loved the complexity of it.  With a rally race, it’s not like other types of auto racing where you’re on a track, you drive fast, turn left, drive fast, turn left, drive fast… and continue like this until you see someone waving that checkered flag. If you’ve ever seen Cannonball Run, a movie from back in the 80’s, you know what a rally race is like.  It’s a real race that happens every year.  In Europe there are Rally races through towns and cities all the time. In a rally race, you drive for days over long distances.  You have to know where you’re ultimately going and your checkpoints along the way.  I thought this was a great analogy for this episode…   Sometimes Lost is Good Sometimes feeling lost is great. We must have down time - Sometimes our spirit our soul will force it upon us by causing us to feel “lost” or to remove our drive for a specific destination.  Consider this a rest area in lif

There’s an old Russian Proverb that says “If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one." This is the way life can feel for people like us.  We’re idea people and we have ideas popping into our head all the time.  We want to catch every single one of them and we end up catching nothing. This week, you’ve heard me talk about this resource quite a few times. It’s a book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.  I just finished it up today and I can tell you, this book was MADE for people who listen to this show: Mindset - Productivity - Self-DIscipline - Purpose These are all major heading in this book. The authors do a great job of illustrating why it’s vital we focus on and FINISH The ONE Thing in our life at this moment which will make all other things unnecessary or a lot easier. The Domino Effect Gary and Jay talk about the Domino Effect. In fact, today I saw a video where someone illustrated this perfectly. You have a MASSIVE goal, but you just have to finish the ONE thing that’s mos

I’m obviously still consumed with consuming Jay Papasan’s book, The One Thing. This is like finding a vein of gold and following it to an abundance of riches. I’m giving you “one year to master 5 things and turn them into habits.” Daily exercise Daily meditation Healthy eating Learn a new language Learn a musical instrument. Most people would go to work immediately, planning their day to include a bit of each one.  THIS IS WHY WE FAIL. We’re trying to take 5 things all at once and condition our mind to make these regular habits in our life. AND we’re exhausted each day.   In addition to everything else you do, you’re trying to add in five things you’re not used to doing. The process of learning a new habit consumes so much of our the available power in our prefrontal cortex, we’re completely tapped-out when we’re trying to learn too many things at once.  Within a couple of months, we’re distracted and slowing letting our new desired habits die off. Now, let’s look at a new approach that will change your lif

What is the Pereto Principle? You may not have heard of the Pereto Principle, but just about everyone has heard of the 80/20 rule. 80% of the failures in a project are caused by the top 20% of the errors.  Focus on the 20% and you’ll take care of almost all of the failures. It’s something I used all the time when I worked as an engineer in electronic materials. Originally, the principle came of out wealth distribution among a given population.  Most businesses will find that 80% of their sales come from just 20% of their customers.  They focus on super serving this 20%. Basically, 80% of the effect in anything is brought on by 20% of the cause.  Vilfredo Pereto showed that about 80% of the land in Italy, at the time, was owned by 20% of the population. Pareto went on to note that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods. How Pereto Came to Productivity I have to give credit, once again, to Jay Papasan, the co-author, along with Gary Keller, of The One Thing.  I’ve been listening to it this past